Employee Experience

Recently, I have been looking at the relationship between employee experience and employee productivity / corporate productivity. Employee experience is a relatively new topic in IT. While there is a lot of research about customer experience and how it impacts the corporate bottom line, the research around employee experience is limited. In the process, I found a good article in Harvard Business Review “Why the Millions We Spend on Employee Engagement Buy Us So Little” by Jacob Morgan. It turns out there is a lot more research on the relationship between employee engagement and performance but the results were not very encouraging: performance gains are short lived and when the effects of the engagement fade, the performance goes back down. No wonder that now the industry is looking at employee experience as the next possible way to increase employee productivity.

Employee experience is defined more broadly than just having good tools at work and includes the office environment and company culture, so IT has to collaborate with real estate / facilities and with HR to deliver meaningful improvements of the employee experience. I also read Jacob Morgan’s book “The Employee Experience Advantage”: it segments companies into experiential and non-experiential (with multiple levels of non-expirentiality) and shows how experiential companies perform much better than non-experiential ones.  While I do not doubt the relationship I still have some questions about what is the cause and what the consequence. Do companies that invest a lot in employee experience really become more successful? Or do successful companies have more money to spend on employee experience?

I have to say that no matter the answer, companies today are definitely investing in employee experience – by offering new modern offices with amenities that keep employees in the office and collaborating with peers as much as possible. IT organizations are relaxing standards for collaboration and other tools to accommodate the various tastes and preferences. This is a particular challenge for companies that grow through acquisitions and each acquisition brings a new set of preferences. This, by the way, also makes the lives of enterprise architects very hard – in the past, they would just push for standardization of acquisitions but today they have to find a way to accommodate deviations from standards.